After a terrible disk crash at our web host, we have now been able to reopen the website based on backups. There still might be some problems logging in. If you have any problems logging in it's suggested that you create a new user. If you see any problems with the web site, please report to webmaster.

A one-sided race database that extends to the 13-point is now available for download. The file is a large one 1.6 GB, and may take close to a day to download even on broadband.

Other bearoff and hypergammon databases can be downloaded from here.

General information about using bearoff databases can be found here, including instructions for rolling your own.

Some of you have reported that there was a bug in the previous version. Cube analysis was inconsistent and gave different results each time you pressed a evaluation button. This bug has been found and fixed.

Because of this bug fix, here is the last build of GNU Backgammon for Windows based on GTK+-1.3 libraries that will ever be available from this site.

The installation archive is avaliable for download here. You can check agains my detached signature here. If you want the md5 checksum it should be: ff6105618d914db4bfc8e717ca820468.

The archive contains the usual stuff with the main executable of the CVS sources from Wednesday March 2nd 2005.

The GTK+ libraries which GNU Backgammon use thoroughly will be updated for the windows builds found on this site. GNU Backgammon have always used GTK+ 1.3 for it's windows builds. It has be faster and smaller for this particular platform. GTK+ has been further improved and updated since that. It has become more powerful and modern at other platforms and the Windows port of GTK is now so stable that we find it suitable to upgrade the interface library also for Windows.

This means that it will be one last install archive with GTK+-1.3 in case some of you preferes GTK+-1.3. The install archive can be downloaded here. Please test and report bugs.

On www.acepoint.de you can get new rpms (built on SLES 9 and RHAS 30) and Debian packages for GNU Backgammon. These packages include the new weights file and the faster 2-ply evaluation.

One of the major problems in the latest Windows builds has been a crashing which appears when the player dances from the bar. See this item in the bugtracker. The problem has been reported by several users. We believe there is something wrong event handling for events from the GUI.

The internal event handling has now been simplified a bit and we hope that this might have fixed the bug. If you're having problems "Cannot move"-bug when dancing, you should download this self-extracting archive. In the dialog appearing you should click Browse to extract the content into your install directory (usually C:\Program Files\gnubg).

Update 17/11-2004: I'm really sad to say: I'm trying this build at another computer, and it doesn't fix the bug here! It's is still possible to recreate the bug. We still would love to get some feedback on the bug in this build. Is it less frequent or more frequent. Does it appear differently in this build than other builds?

After Joseph's fix for the choice of nets, I reran my collection of matches through both the old (pre-pruning) and new versions of gnubg.

I have 297 matches consisting of 2509 games.

First - speed improvement. The pruning net analysis took just under 36 hours, during this period I was also using gnubg to analyse some other matches, so there were about three games whose analysis took longer than the old version, almost undoubtedly for this reason. The general speedup was 1.74 times with a standard error of 0.37. [Read more]

There has been lots of bug reports lately. Fortunately we have been able to sort out some of this bugs.

• Wide column of MWC - Fixed!
• Match Equity Tables that's not read properly - Fixed!
• Problems when using "," instead of "." as a decimal separator. - Fixed!
• Pruning settings that can't be turned off - Fixed!

Also, Joseph has made the pruning move selection within the plies cubeful. That may improve the evaluations with pruning networks.

Update: A bug connected to the pruning neural nets was just revealed and fixed. There is a even newer installation archive available now. 5 Nov 2004 8:30 am CET.

Note: there is possibly other bugs as well, but if you use this installation archive you won't be bugged by the above mentioned bugs. It will be easier for you to find other bugs instead. :-)

Windows users can get their installation archive here.

An new installation archive of GNU Backgammon is now available. This installation archive have hopefully corrected some of the bug in the previous. This build also uses the pruning networks.

Warning: This install will overwrite your settings. Hopefully the settings file provided have some better default values then the previous installation archives.

Yesterday there was a bug that made GNU Backgammon open in Czech language. There is a new archive available today which hopefully fixes this. (Added 29. October)

You can get the new installation here.

I'm happy to announce the release of the GNU Backgammon Documentation Wiki. Please visit the Wiki here. [Read more]